You cannot stand in a place of Torah until you fail there. We have to destigmatize failure. The Torah teaches that what we do five minutes after the transgression is important. Successful businessmen have gone bankrupt two or three times.
[TRF: Moshe says to HaShem that he is like a woman carrying a sucking baby. This fits in perfectly with the metaphor of the Israelites being in childhood while wandering in the desert.
We go into the wilderness with the humiliation of the Sotah. The husband brings his money or his wife to the Temple.
Eleven is the number of spices which make up the incense. It is the symbol of the unity of good and evil in the world. Everybody has a basic contradiction in their personality, such as bonding v. aloneness, love and hate, motivated and involved or running and hiding, thriving v. sick, support or push away, in community or isolated.
Moshe whispered to the G*d of Compassion (Be Haâalothekcha, chapter 11, line 11).
The inoculation teaches us how to face adversity: the lack of house on Sukkot, the lack of bread on Passover, the lack of sleep on Shavuos, etc.
The kindest thing Yaakov did was to send Yosef out to his brothers. When you learn how to live with adversity and not whine about it, you learn to smile.
It was not hard for Moshe to eat nothing but manna, walk through the desert, separate from his wife; these things were not tests for him. These were the tests of the Israelites. His test was dealing with whiney people.
The destruction of the Temple was a bad failure due to bad business ethics. You cannot teach Torah in a place of bad business ethics.
J.C. is shown to be against the rabbis. However, he himself was a rabbi. He entered the seductive world of revelation and miracles. Esther was a more mature leader than Moshe. She never said it was from G*d and never performed miracles. Moshe was an immature leader of an immature group, the nursing baby. Therefore Passover is our least mature holiday, when we sit around and act mature, while Purim is our most mature holiday, when we act like children.
The Spies might have said: We love being nomads, we are scared of the Canaanites and we cannot conquer the land, when we enter the Promised Land Moses will die and we do not want that. However there is another Midrash that says that the Canaanites had not yet w2orn out their merits. This would take 38 years, at which time the land would vomit them out. The seven Canaanite tribes correspond to the sepherot.
The book of Bamidbar is spiritual things alternating with challenging matters.
Eichman said he would sell Jews starting in 1943 when the war was not going well for the Nazis and they needed money. The Jews made up the backbone of the Community movement and they made the Russian revolution. Their agenda was to destroy Judaism. Stalin started killing all the Jewish Communists. One branch came to Israel in the group which also had Golda Meir and Ben Gurion. Russia was the first country to recognize Israel. Some of them thought it would better if all the Orthodox Jews were gassed. A thousand Yemenite babies were kidnapped and raised by secular Jews on kibbutzim. These anti-G*d people drained swamps. They believed the Arab working people would join them. There was heartbreak when Russia supported the Arabs in the 1956 war. They wept when Stalin died. âRudolf Israel Kastner[1] (1906âMarch 15, 1957) was a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and lawyer who became known for helping Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.â http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Kastner
[TRF: why would HaShem have atheist Jews start Israel?]
After the Israelites listened to the report of the Spies and were told they would wander in the desert for 38 years, one segment insisted on fighting. These people were not learning from a mistake. Feeling ashamed of the mistake is not learning from the mistake. The people with the aggression are the ones who are afraid. Jeremiah is descended from Rechov and Joshua.
Sacred Fire page 110.
Caleb does not bother to argue with the Spies, does not enter into a debate with them and try to demolish their arguments and their reasoning. He limited himself to the simple phrase: We must go forth into the Land. This is very much like saying: Let us agree to disagree. [TRF: When the Spies saw the wall around Jericho, they put up a wall around themselves. Caleb did not try to crash through that wall, but went around it.]
The rage directed against the Canaanites will be directed against the person arguing with them. People with poor self-image are always projecting, and if they see you as a lion, they will attack.
Rabbi Henoch Dov teaches in Denver, Colorado. You can contact him through his web page, www.RabbiHenochDov.com or via email sh6r6v4t9@aol.com.
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